It’s time for early voting in Pennsylvania

It wasn’t just a voter referendum on President Donald Trump that changed the Pennsylvania landscape in last week’s midterm elections.

Solid judicial decisions played a role, too, particularly the court-ordered redrawing of a gerrymandered congressional map that had favored Republicans. And years earlier, the overturning of a restrictive voter ID law.

This is progress, but Pennsylvania still trails many states in voter access.

Early voting would help bring the state into the 21st century. (If you waited in a long line in the rain on Tuesday, you might want to send a follow-up message to your state representative and senator. In Harrisburg, bills to allow early voting die in committee.)

Pennsylvania’s idea of early voting is by absentee ballot — but you’ve to mail in a sworn statement that you’re disabled or going to be out of town on Election Day.

Thirtyseven states extend some form of early voting.

New Jersey, for example, allows no-excuse absentee voting, and lets people vote early in person at voter registration sites, for 45 days before an election. What else? Same-day registration would be a step forward, along with easier ballot access for thirdparty candidates. And open primaries.

A predicted blue wave of Democratic fervor didn’t sweep through every corner Pennsylvania last week, but a statewide rebalancing took hold.

In January, the state’s congressional delegation will be perfectly purple — nine Republicans and nine Democrats, a dramatic change from the gerrymandered results of the last decade.

That imbalance, enabled by a Republican governor and Legislature, helped to elect 13 Republicans to Congress, even though Democrats turned out in higher numbers overall.

Pennsylvania played a leading role in turning the U.S. House of Representatives to a Democratic majority. The state saw an unprecedented number of women candidates, including Democrat Susan Wild, who captured the Lehigh Valley’s newly drawn 7th District.

It’s notable that Wild won by 15,000 votes in the new 7th district, which reunited the Lehigh Valley. Republican Marty Nothstein, by a razor-thin margin, appears to have won the race to serve the final two months of former Rep. Charlie Dent’s term in the old 15th District. That district was gerrymandered to protect Dent after the 2010 census. Republicans still ran strong, and won, in Republican-dominated areas of the state.

That’s the way it’s supposed to work.

Still, Pennsylvania voters sent a message in re-electing U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, as New Jersey voters did in returning ethically challenged Sen. Robert Menendez to Washington.

Pennsylvanians opted for a split state government again, choosing Gov. Tom Wolf as a hedge against legislative Republicans, who retained majorities in both houses.

The rancorous segregation of Americans into red and blue camps isn’t going away, and it won’t be helped by selectively limiting voter access — as North Dakota did in making voting difficult for native Americans. A town in Kansas moved a polling site out of town. Georgia and other states have opted for aggressive purging of registration rolls.

It falls to the courts, in many cases, to point out partisan overload.

Witness the federal court decision last week to toss Maryland’s congressional map. It had been sliced and diced, a panel of judges said, to help elect Democrats.

That’s the way it’s supposed to work.

The rancorous segregation of Americans into red and blue camps isn’t going away, and it won’t be helped by selectively limiting voter access.